Erlin endured the sour reek, lying flat against the edge of a freshly dug trench. One hand held an explosive crossbow, the other braced on the rim as he looked down the slope below them.
"Where are the Puchi Masters? How come I don't see any Puchi Masters?"
A slap landed on the back of his head. Erlin hurriedly straightened his helmet as his officer's voice came from behind him.
"Idiot! Those things are controlled by the Fortress's Puchi Masters. The Puchi Masters are hidden in among them. We just kill them all in a bit, that's all."
One after another, the Puchi curled into balls and began to charge.
Not until the Puchi had rolled halfway up the slope did the officer give the order to attack.
Erlin raised his crossbow, aimed at one Puchi in the pale-white mass that seemed to be holding back its speed on purpose, and fired a bolt.
The explosion tore the target Puchi and several others around it to pieces. Almost at the same moment, a dozen-odd Puchi nearby uncurled from their balls, dropped to the ground, and froze in place, dazed.
The dwarves' trenches were arranged in tiers. Bolts flew from the rear, and the explosions rippling through the Puchi swarm successfully stalled their charge. But soon, Puchi appeared in the sky as well.
Erlin reloaded and aimed his bolt at the sky, only to take another punch from his officer. "Keep hitting the ground Puchi! The ones in the air aren't your job!"
Sure enough, when those flying Puchi tried to close in to fire their mushroom cannons or simply blow themselves up, the dwarven mages in the fortlets at the trench junctions made their move. Several blasts of [Great Storm] shot straight into the sky, catching the Puchi in a churning storm of wind blades that sliced them a thousand times over. They dissolved into a rain of mycelium that drifted softly down. Only a few Puchi dove down and self-destructed, but because the dwarves had deliberately shaped their trenches a certain way, those blasts caused few casualties.
The sight made the dwarves around him cheer under their breath. If the fight kept going like this, victory seemed within easy reach.
Erlin excitedly drew the string again. His fingertip had just hooked the catch when someone grabbed him by the collar and yanked him, crossbow and all, backward. "Idiot, look out!"
The officer drove his axe haft hard into a slightly bulging patch of ground in the trench. With a muffled pop, a Puchi that had been about to dig its way out was run through by the haft and went still.
Erlin, beside him, hadn't even had time to breathe a sigh of relief before he saw, to his horror, more mounds of earth bulging up around his officer's feet...
Boom.
It took Erlin enormous effort to dig his barely breathing officer out of the collapsed trench.
Thanks to his runic heavy armor, he had just barely survived three Puchi blowing themselves up right in his face.
Erlin quickly fed his officer a healing potion.
Just then, another wave of flying Puchi was torn apart in the air by the mages.
Countless spores drifted down from the sky.
The officer's eyes went wide.
"No... don't!"
The man who hadn't blinked once in battle now strained with everything he had to pull back, but nothing could stop the spores from settling onto him.
Erlin watched it happen, powerless to help.
For now his officer showed no change, but both of them knew he had been parasitized. In a few days, mycelium would push out from under his skin and crisscross all over it...
Erlin wanted to comfort him but had no idea what to say.
He knew all too well what the parasitized faced now.
Scenes like this played out all across the battlefield. For a while, the firepower of the dwarves' first line dropped, and the Fortress finally sent in its true main force of Puchi.
Another wave of flying Puchi rushed in, and the mages in the fortlets once again loosed [Great Storm], the spell best suited to dealing with airborne Puchi.
But this time, a great many Puchi broke from their formation on purpose and blew themselves up early, before the storm hit.
The turbulence from the blasts blocked the storm. Right behind it, a slightly larger flying Puchi tore through the chaos and reached the fortlet. A dwarf leaped up with a hammer, ready to smash it apart.
What met him was a [Flame Dragon's Breath LV7], squeezed out from the mushroom cap.
Flame poured down and swallowed him in an instant. Even the fortlet below melted half away in the searing heat. The dwarven mages inside had time for one last scream before falling silent forever.
The fortlets in other directions came under attack from Dragon's Breath Puchi too. Fire, frost, lightning, deadly poison, corrosion!
With the mages beheaded, the other flying Puchi still circling high above swooped down all at once. The first line, where the dwarves had only just held back thousands of Puchi, collapsed in an instant, with heavy dead and wounded.
Ignoring his officer's wish to die, Erlin tried to drag him back along the trench toward the rear.
But the Puchi were still hot on their heels.
A Dragon's Breath Puchi came spitting frost down the length of the trench, and it was about to reach right over Erlin's head.
A red-bladed axe spun out, cut the Dragon's Breath Puchi in two, then flew back and landed firmly in a rough, large hand. Erlin stared at the figure, his voice rising before he could help it. "Badul... it's Lord Badul!"
Badul didn't pause. He gripped the axe haft in a reverse hold and charged into the Puchi swarm.
In a single rise and fall of his body, two more Dragon's Breath Puchi were cut down.
One of them self-destructed the instant it was struck. The shockwave swept past Badul's side, but he only tilted his head. His stride didn't so much as falter, and all he came away with was a few minor scrapes.
As for the Puchi, whether ordinary Puchi, Dragon's Breath Puchi, or the heavily defended Heavy Armor Puchi, none could take a single one of Badul's swings. In the time he spent tying up the pursuit, the surviving dwarven remnants of the first line withdrew safely into the rear positions.
In fact, if not for the whole line falling back, the situation right around Badul looked almost like a counterattack on the Fortress.
With nearly everyone evacuated, Badul stopped fighting on.
He spun once, shredding the Puchi all around him, then turned to pull back.
But a huge wall of earth suddenly rose up out of the mud, cutting across the space between him and the rear positions and sealing off his retreat.
Badul stopped, turned his head, and looked toward the source of the spell.
No. 10 hovered in midair atop a whirlwind, its mushroom cap dipping slightly to cast a shadow in front of Badul.
"Come and go as you please? It's not that easy!" No. 10 said directly through telepathy.
Badul looked at No. 10 up in the air and gave a twitch of his mouth.
He swung the red-bladed axe in a full circle one-handed and smashed it into the earthen wall behind him.
With a thunderous crash, the wall broke apart and rubble flew.
Then he leveled the axe at No. 10 in challenge. "Then come and try to stop me!"
No. 10's answer was magic gathering on four tentacles at once.
The ground heaved Badul up from underfoot, a fireball shot straight at his face, thunder crashed down from the sky onto the top of his head, and a cage of light formed around him to lock him in place. "What the hell? Casting all at once?!" Badul had never imagined No. 10 could cast like this.
In his desperation, his axe blade lit with a dark red glow, and he put everything he had into striking first at the light cage closing in on him.
Badul was a war hero for good reason. Even ambushed like this, he broke free at the cost of only light wounds, and in the tangle that followed with No. 10, his flying axe even severed two of its tentacles.
And then he watched No. 10 get serious, extending all eighteen tentacles from its body, countless glimmers of magic so bright they made even the sun pale...
Behind the battlefield, taking in the whole picture, Lin Jun studied the [Charmed] status on Badul's panel, deep in thought.
(End of Chapter)
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